White Clouds Drift On and On

Typically working with dub and ambient music as Bvdub, here Van Wey ditches drums and bass for a full-on, immersive Gas-inspired experience.

As Bvdub, Brock Van Wey pokes holes in the fabric between dub and ambient music. On his first release under his own name, White Clouds Drift On and On, he discards drums and bass entirely, producing his finest work yet in the process. The tracks are built from tapered, drenching loops of tone, massed in respiring pulses. The music beats, shivers, yawns open. The album's title, while almost comically generic, is apt: without drums, it's wonderfully unimpeded, like a huge pendulum slowly spending its energy. We would get that it's Van Wey's most personal work even if it weren't for song titles like "I Knew Happiness Once"-- the tracks are sensitively inhabited, with a human ache in every cascade.

Though Gas is Van Wey's most obvious forebearer, traces of modern minimal techno and dubstep echo in the distance. You can detect the Field on "A Gentle Hand to Hold", where an idyllic guitar loop slaloms lazily through voices as evanescent as soap bubbles, and Burial on "Too Little Too Late", with its gauzy clatter, and vocal information about rapture and pain. The album's emotional depth makes itself plain, but it has a conceptual dimension as well: It lies on a continuum of deconstruction. Dub itself is already an abstraction of something else; White Clouds is an abstraction of dub; and the bonus disc-- a series of interpretations by Stephen Hitchell, as Intrusion-- abstracts White Clouds. Hitchell breaks up Van Wey's glaciers into ice chunks floating on vast seas, sometimes gathering them back up with nets of percussion. The second disc also stretches the total play time to upwards of two and a half hours. This amplitude winds up being important.

White Clouds is immediately pleasurable for the opulence of its sounds. From the unhurriedly swooping strings of "Too Little Too Late" to the tinkling piano in an engulfing corona of drones on "A Chance to Start Over", Van Wey cultivates an unremitting sense of majesty and loneliness. But to praise ambient music for prettiness is like praising a house track because you can dance to it. Epic pace and scale are what push White Clouds over the border between pretty and awesome. The deliberate pace screws with your perception of time, and minutes melt away unnoticed. When "I Knew Happiness Once" finally begins to swirl around the drain, I'm always astonished that 16 minutes have elapsed. Van Wey lets his parts linger until they feel inert and permanent, only then introducing new elements-- often ecstatic voices, piercing what seemed an impenetrable wall of sound. He uses long forms not to antagonize or subdue, but to unleash a welter of happy-sad feeling. It's the most gracious, forthcoming ambient music I've heard this year.